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Just looking for recommendations: what's the best book you've read recently?

Can anyone out there recommend a good electric razor? My old one can no longer hold a charge for very long, and it was never all that great to begin with.

My facial hair doesn't grow very quickly. I have a separate beard trimmer (for a small goatee type thing), but if a razor could do that and trim nose hairs, great. Unlikely, I figure, but great.

But mostly, yeah, just a good razor. Anyone?

Last weekend we cleared out the garage. This weekend we participated in a neighborhood garage sale and made $1050. What we didn't sell we donated to Salvation Army.

Woo! 🙂

P.S. I'm saving some of the "creepy customer" stories for my close friends and family. But yeah, if you've heard some stories in the past, they're likely true. People can behave pretty strangely at garage sales.

I normally shy away from chicken breast sandwiches, both in restaurants and at home. Previously I made them on the George Foreman grill (once, maybe) and the meat was dry and tasteless.

Cut to tonight, when I made the most incredible chicken sandwiches ever. I simply cut off the flank part of the breast to make a rounded even-thickness breast, cut slits into the meat, rubbed in some seasoning, and cooked them on the grill at a medium heat (I kept opening the lid to let heat out - it was getting up to 500° and I wanted to keep it at about 300°).

Put on some bacon and some cheese, with a good piece of bread, and the meat was tender, flavorful, and oh so yummy.

If you're a fan of Wii Sports (and goodness knows we'd have still bought a Wii if that was the only game available for it), then you should really pick up a copy of Wii Sports Resort. It's bigger, better, and has some pretty fun stuff in it. My favorites include Basketball, Archery, Table Tennis, Wakeboarding (though sometimes I think it cheats - I set the Wiimote on the ground so I know it's flat, but my guy still doesn't stick his landing), and Frisbee. Power Cruising is okay, as is Air Sports.

Cycling kind of sucks (your Mii gets tired all the time), Swordplay is lame (like boxing in the original, you just end up swinging your arms around like crazy), and Golf is the same as it was before. Canoeing, blah, and Bowling is also the same, though now the 100-pin game is ten frames long and always has 100 pins.

Oh, and most of the games have two or three variants. So there are twelve styles of games, but I'd guess about 30 actual activities. Swordplay sucks in Versus and the other mode (the name escapes me), but the "Speed Slice" mode is nifty and fun, for example.

How's he done? And, in hindsight (six-month hindsight, anyway), was all that self-assigned intellectual superiority really warranted, or has Obama pretty much failed to live up to expectations?

We're still in Iraq and I hear taxes on the middle class are going up. Now, again, I'm not terribly political, but I am a fan of armchair psychology, and never before can I recall an election in which so many people were duped into thinking that any one person could effect the sorts of "change" that Obama supporters laid on him.

Cyndicate, our desktop application for aggregating and reading RSS and Atom feeds, is now $19.95.

Lotta good this has been doing us all lately:

BusyCal is now available in a public beta, and I'm giving it a try. I plan to check out the videos at some point too, but for $20 or $30 ((I have three computers, but one is my laptop, and I rarely use it for much, so iCal syncing via MobileMe should be fine. If I have to pay $20 to upgrade my Mac and my wife's plus $40 for my laptop, I'll probably just pass.)), it seems well worth it.

I'm curious how other people use the Terminal. Do you keep a few windows open constantly? Do you open it as needed? Is it light-text-on-dark-background? Translucent? What size?

I open a new Terminal window when I need it. The app's always running. My default window is black translucent (I call it "smoke") at 128 x 36 with a relatively small font (currently Anonymous Pro 11, previously ProFont X 9) in white (with some terminal colors enabled, and bold fonts allowed).

I use tcsh, with about 50 or so aliases in my .tcshrc file.

I've just gotten in on the new Xbox fall update, the preview. There are a lot of things I don't really care about - you can buy "props" for your avatars now, for example - but the update is well worth it for one area of improvement alone: Netflix.

The first run at the Netflix integration was great simply because it let you stream movies in addition to your three-at-a-time (or whatever you had) plan. Now, you can not only watch what's in your queue, but you can manage your queue, search for new movies to add, browse genre lists of movies, and more. Actual playback is improved because the video quality is now bumped UP when your network capacity increases. Better yet, there's no buffering in either direction: if your network capacity changes, the stream nearly instantly begins showing the higher- or lower-quality video.

I used to joke that Microsoft wasn't an engineering (or software) company, it was a marketing company. These days, it seems even that's not true, and I agree with John's assessment in his latest fireball.

But then again, what do you expect when you hire a former Wal-Mart exec to be your COO?

Prior to today I'd been using Soundtrack Pro 1.1 for my podcast editing. Today, in a first run-through, I noticed several things which I found annoying about 3.0.

First, every file was for some reason saved as a six-channel file. This was a pain until I figured out that I could delete four channels. I saw no preference to say "I never want surround sound."

Second, in STP 1.1 I'd edit the AIFF file and hit cmd-S to save over the .aif file. This worked for WAV files too. In STP 3.0 every time I hit cmd-s (or Save in the Save menu) I'm given a sheet to save an audio project. I can choose an AIFF file, but then the next time (sometimes five or six minutes later when I want to save again), the same thing.

Third, in STP 1.1 the "non-stereo button" (it's at the bottom, looks like a little "Y") button would stick if you clicked it while holding down the option key. This still works in STP 3.0 except that the sounds still play in full stereo… just clicking and holding down the button works as expected.

It's true, according to Canon Rumors. If so, I'll have to investigate selling my existing 70-200 to pick up some of the new ones. I love the aperture, the weight doesn't bug me, and I use the lens so often that if there are even some small improvements, it will be worthwhile, particularly in crispness.

There are also rumors about the 24-70. I'd love to see a new version of that lens too. Those two lenses are on my camera(s) roughly 98% of the time.